Computers are used for a variety of applications, including office work, controllers of production systems and robots. This requires the interaction of a great variety of devices and software components in the computer system in question. New devices or software components are also dynamically integrated into the computer system according to requirements. In this case, undesired behavior of the computer systems can appear for a wide variety of reasons. Typical causes are incompatibilities of individual devices or software components, or an erroneous setup of these devices or components.
Service providers offer to eliminate this undesirable behavior. Typically, a service center is contacted after the appearance of undesirable behavior, and attempts in a brief telephone conversation to obtain specific information about the undesirable behavior and to determine or at least narrow down the possible causes. It is indispensable to transfer the configuration data of a computer system and the detailed error messages to the service center. In error messages, information in the form of text or error codes, or even instantaneous memory contents, is typically transferred. Log files compiled by the computer system or the programs that have been run can also be transferred.
Some software programs cannot generate log files or output error messages relating to the computer system. These include many Web-based or terminal-based applications, or applications that run in a particularly encapsulated environment. For security reasons, these programs are not granted any write privileges. For these applications, however, this has the undesired effect that support and narrowing down of the causes of the malfunction by means of a telephone call or a decentralized service center is considerably more difficult when the malfunction appears, owing to the lack of log files or the like.